


kneeling to the frozen lights

by gatsbyparty



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Gen, Post-Series, Slice of Life, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:06:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lyra is a grown up sort of woman, and it's not everything she thought it would be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kneeling to the frozen lights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bringyouhometoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bringyouhometoo/gifts).



“[I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all . . . like an opera.](http://thinkexist.com/quotation/i_wonder_anybody_does_anything_at_oxford_but/145332.html)”  
  
“God is dead,” Lyra says furiously, dripping all over the entryway, and it’s making an awful mess, she’s well sure of it, but it doesn’t matter, not really, nothing seems to. “God is dead, and you can’t make me go if I don’t want to, and I don’t, so you won’t very well be seeing me there!”  
  
She kicks the flat door shut in the man’s face and sits down in her own puddle. She’s in an awful sulk, and Pan is poking and nudging and winding his way around her neck. She lifts her chin to let him press closer and tucks her hands between her knees.  
  
“You don’t need to be rude,” Pan says. Lyra shrugs one shoulder.  
  
“I’m soaked through and I’ve just gotten home and, anyway, who’d want to go to a Church social? It sounds like an awful bore!”  
  
“You didn’t need to tell him God was dead!”  
  
“En’t need to tell me what to do,” Lyra snaps, then presses the back of her hand to her mouth to stifle her startled laughter. “I sound like I’m twelve.”  
  
“You acted like you were twelve,” Pan scolds, but his cool little nose is poking at Lyra’s chin, so she knows she’s forgiven again.  
  
Class is over for the day, and while she would in other years have gone back to her room in the back of the quad or to her dorm at St Sophia’s, this year Lyra is eighteen, with a little flat all her own on Banbury Road . Her furniture is a slight step above what she’s used to, although still quite shoddier than with Mrs Coulter. Her blankets are soft and warm, at least, and the kettle boils fine, and her desk is dark, scarred wood, so really things could be much worse.  
  
She gets up and goes to change, into a pair of men’s pajama pants she had bought with a furious blush on her face, but there’s no one around to see, and in Will’s Oxford girls had worn pants without anyone looking at them funny, and they’re comfortable in the chill. At the desk is a chair with a folded up blanket for a cushion. Lyra sits on this chair to open her books, all from the St Sophia’s library, and fishes out the alethiometer from the hole she’d hacked into the back of the desk. It’s an easy thing to cover, even though it felt awful to cut into the desk, but the space between the desk and the drawers inside is just big enough for something alethiometer sized. She hasn’t wanted to look at in weeks, between exams and frustration at her slowness. She used to be able to hold a hundred meanings in her mind at once and pry out the meanings she needed.  
  
Now she fumbles like a first former with her letters. She remembers the understanding and the shape of the meanings, sees the spider’s web without the knots, but outlines do nothing to answer questions like _How do I cross universes without tearing a hole in space and making things worse?_  or _Does Will know I’m on the bench?_ or even something as simple as _Is my dinner gone cold yet?_  
  
Dinner is gone cold, of course, because the second Lyra picks up the alethiometer she’s sucked into a library world full of reference numbers and symbols entirely more complicated than anything she remembers.  
  
“It was instinct, practically,” she says to Pan through a mouthful of congealed beef stew. She loves the texture of the potatoes and the way the beef splits to shreds between her teeth. The carrots are tolerable at best.Her table is a tiny thing, a cracked wobbly card table, but her seat is an ancient arm chair that she finds difficult to get out of.  
  
Pan is unimpressed with Lyra’s frustration. He just wants more beef.  Lyra concedes that she wants more beef, too, and that’s about all she wants from life right now.  
  
She doesn’t have class on Wednesdays, so she spends the morning of the next day hunting through a bookstore full of ancient reference books. She finds one or two that might be useful, brings them home to add to her collection, and in the afternoon returns to studying.  
  
  
Neither of the new books turn out to actually be useful, but they’re interesting for all that they were a waste of money. She scribbles notes in the margins of her symbol dictionaries, and dreams of seeing Will in that other Oxford.  
  
Why shouldn’t it be possible, she demands the darkness. She made the world do what she wanted before, so why not this one small thing? It’s just love, after all, two kids who haven’t seen each other in half a decade, and it’s such a simple thing she wants from the universe. Just a glimpse of Will these days. Not even a whole day with him, she consoles herself. Not even that. Just a-a reflection in a puddle so she can remember his haircut, or a snatch of the music he hums on a walk.  
  
  
  
“You have the stars, at least,” Pan says drowsily, when he’s sore and sick with Lyra’s restless nighttime shifting. “You’ll both see those. It’s a consolation, anyway.”  
  
“It’s a consolation, anyway,” Lyra repeats, and remembers promising not to make comparisons all the time. “Well, it’s not as though we’re unhappy, Pan, just a bit lonely, I think.”  
  
“Oh, shut your eyes! The sun is coming up, look!”  
  
The sun rises over Oxford once more, and Lyra faces back into the light of the world of her birth.


End file.
